Heritage

With that statement, a mobile art studio and exhibition was touring through Europe this summer. A PR container, painted in gold, is an eye-catcher and a temporary home for artist Jonny Vekemans www.lightpaintings.be and his team. Through an old and simple camera obscura photography technique, he inspires residents of cities in the Czech Republic, Poland, Austria, Germany and Belgium to rediscover their industrial heritage. The 'industrial heritage = gold' tour is a promotional campaign of the SHIFT-X project that ignites the awareness of the importance of the European industrial heritage. At every stop during the tour, local inhabitants add their photographs to the expo. During the final conference of the project, on October 15th, the complete exhibition can be seen in C-mine in Belgium (Genk).

Industrial heritage?

Artist Jonny, a former miner, agrees and tells the story: 'In Heerlen, the Netherlands, once I met another ex-miner. He was very moved by my photo's. In his region, all these mining premises are gone. The emotion he had about that was like he lived just for nothing. If you take away the heritage, you rob the identity of people. It is felt that deep!' Camera obscura?

'People do learn to use their eyes again', Jonny says. 'No one takes a closer and careful look nowadays. With the camera obscura, people learn to look closer at their environment, the buildings, the light. In the box is only one photo paper, so you really have to look close before choosing your image. You learn to take your time for that again (...) and by the way: the technique is approximately as old as our industrial heritage is.'